Slight Reliability

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How do you begin contributing to an open source project? What's it like? What do you get out of it?

This week I'm joined by Wendy Ha who shares her unique story of joining the Kubernetes project and becoming a contributor. We explore...

⛰️ What it's like working on one of the biggest open source projects in the world
🏆 The benefits of contributing to open source
⌚ How much time and effort does it take?
🌏 The unique challenges of contributing from APAC (and the need for more contributors in Australia and New Zealand)
🏃‍♀️‍➡️ How to get started

...and much more.

You can find Wendy on:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wendyha-sut/

Ways you can get started contributing to Open Source:

CNCF from Zero to Merge Program: https://project.linuxfoundation.org/cncf-zero-to-merge-application
LFX Mentorship Program: https://mentorship.lfx.linuxfoundation.org/#projects_all
Outreachy Mentorship Program: https://www.outreachy.org/mentor/
Google Summer of Code: https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/
Kubernetes Release Team Shadowing: https://github.com/kubernetes/sig-release/blob/master/release-team/README.md#release-team-shadow

You can find Stephen on:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/slightreliability.bsky.social
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/SlightReliability
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@the_kiwi_sre

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As an #SRE how do you influence senior leadership to get support and priority for the things you care about?

To answer this question I'm joined by Nora Jones, founder of Jeli and now Head of Pricing, Product Strategy and Growth at PagerDuty. Our conversation touches on...

🤝 How understanding needs to flow both ways (between engineers and leaders)
🎨 Reliability is as much an art as a science
📝 Using napkin math to start conversations
🧠 Understand the system (your org) before trying to change it
💬 Using micro-interactions to gradually implement change

...and so much more.

You can find Nora on:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/norajones1/

You can find more about PagerDuty here: https://www.pagerduty.com/nlp/trial-sign-up/

You can find Stephen on:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/slightreliability.bsky.social
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/SlightReliability
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@the_kiwi_sre

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This week I do a retrospective on the Slight Reliability podcast.

👂 How many people listen to it?
❤️ How do I feel about the show?
🎉 What's going well?
🪴 What could be better?
❔ What's next for the show?

If you want to check out the podcast that came before Slight Reliability, you can find Performance Time archived on YouTube here:
https://www.youtube.com/@performance-time

You can find Stephen on:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/slightreliability.bsky.social
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/SlightReliability
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@the_kiwi_sre

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Have you burned out at work? What was your experience? How did you work through it?

This week I'm joined by the incredible Colette Alexander to discuss what burnout is, what it means, and we both share our personal experiences burning out at work. We cover...

🔥 What is burnout?
❓ Why does it happen?
🫀 What are the symptoms?
🥊 Fight, flight, or freeze
🧑‍🚒 Advice on how to recover

...and much more.

Resources from the show...

Why you're so angry at work (and what to do about it) by Natalie Rothfels https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/why-youre-so-angry-at-work

Burnout (book) by Amelia and Emily Nagoski https://www.burnoutbook.net/ 

How to do nothing (book) by Jenny Odell https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/600671/how-to-do-nothing-by-jenny-odell/

You can find Colette on:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/colette-alexander-4168267/

You can find the This Is Fine! podcast here: https://www.thisisfinepod.com/

You can find Stephen on:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/slightreliability.bsky.social
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/SlightReliability
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@the_kiwi_sre

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This week I'm joined by the wonderful Hanson Ho to discuss the unique challenges and opportunities in making our mobile apps observable! We cover...

📱 The mobile/backend observability divide
✍️ The challenge of distributed tracing on mobile apps
🌏 The entire device runtime environment matters for your app
👤 The quest for user-centric mobile observability
✅ Advice on how to get started with mobile observability

...and much more.

You can find Hanson on:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hanson-ho/
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/bidetofevil.wtf

You can find out more about Embrace at https://embrace.io/

You can find Stephen on:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/slightreliability.bsky.social
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/SlightReliability
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@the_kiwi_sre

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This week on the I'm joined once more by SRE leader Michelle Casey who gives a broad and shallow introduction to resilience engineering. We cover...

🏋️‍♀️ Reliability VS Robustness VS Resilience
🧩 What is a complex system?
🔢 Safety one/safety two
🧠 Mental models
😩 Human error

...and so much more.

Resources from this episode:

Four concepts for resilience (paper) by Dr. David Woods https://www.researchgate.net/publication/276139783_Four_concepts_for_resilience_and_the_implications_for_the_future_of_resilience_engineering

Building and revising adaptive capacity sharing for technical incident response (paper) by Dr Richard Cook and Dr Beth Long https://www.researchgate.net/publication/344259449_Building_and_revising_adaptive_capacity_sharing_for_technical_incident_response_A_case_of_resilience_engineering

Systems Thinking for Incident Analysis (talk) by Laura Nolan from LFI Conf 23 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uXGg3g2yps

How Complex Systems Fail (website) by Dr. Richard Cook https://how.complexsystems.fail/

A Tale of Two Safeties (book) by Erik Hollnagel https://erikhollnagel.com/A Tale of Two Safeties.pdf

From Safety One to Safety Two (book) by Erik Hollnagel https://www.england.nhs.uk/signuptosafety/wp-content/uploads/sites/16/2015/10/safety-1-safety-2-whte-papr.pdf

Resilience: It's not you, it's the System (talk) by Dr Carl Horsley https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugC3GTKt23U

Above the line / Below the line (paper) by Dr Richard Cook (not original link) https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Above-the-Line-Below-the-Line-framework-adapted-with-permission-Cook-Woods-2016_fig3_333091997

How Your Systems Keep Running Day After Day (talk) by John Allspaw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xA5U85LSk0M

Behind Human Error (book) https://www.amazon.com.au/Behind-Human-Error-David-Woods/dp/0754678342

The Field Guide to Human Error Investigations (book) by Sydney Dekker https://www.humanfactors.lth.se/fileadmin/lusa/Sidney_Dekker/books/DekkersFieldGuide.pdf

The Howie Guide (paper) by Dr Laura Maguire, Nora Jones and Vanessa Granda https://howie-guide.pagerduty.com/

Resilience Engineering: Where do I start? (website) by Lorin Hochstein https://www.resilience-engineering-association.org/resources/where-do-i-start/

The STELLA report (paper) https://snafucatchers.github.io/

DORA Communtiy Discussion - Resilience Engineering (discussion) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3cEJ7njJbc

This Is Fine! (podcast) by Colette Alexander and Clint Byrum https://www.thisisfinepod.com/the-pod

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This week on the 100th episode I'm joined by DevOps and Resilience Engineering legend John Allspaw to talk about learning (especially from incidents). We discuss...

📒 Classroom VS situated learning
🤝 The myth of the perfect handover
ITIL as a coping strategy to try and make sense of the organic, wild, and messy
🥕 How you cannot incentivise to avoid incidents (it doesn't work that way)
❤️‍🩹 You can't understand how something is broken unless you know how it's supposed to work in the first place

...and much more.

Resources from this episode:

Pre-Accident Investigations by Todd Conklin https://www.amazon.com.au/Pre-Accident-Investigations-Introduction-Organizational-Safety/dp/1409447820
Working at the Center of the Cyclone by Dr. Richard Cook https://itrevolution.com/articles/center-of-the-cyclone-dr-richard-cook/

To join the Resilience in Software Foundation head over to: https://resilienceinsoftware.org/

You can find John on:

Website: https://www.kitchensoap.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jallspaw/

You can find Adapative Capacity Labs here: https://www.adaptivecapacitylabs.com/

You can find Stephen on:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/slightreliability.bsky.social
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/SlightReliability
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@the_kiwi_sre

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This week I'm joined by SRE leader Trent Hornibrook who shares a story about how he improved on-call early in his career, and then we explore the broader theme of focusing on the things that matter in observability, incident response, on-call, and beyond. We discuss...

🔌 Empowering engineers to implement change in your org
🧑‍🍼 Focusing on what matters (customer & business > technology)
👀 Not just adding more monitoring as the output of each PIR
😎 How autonomy can lead to accountability
🌳 How to influence change in an organisation

...and much more.

You can find Trent on:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trenthornibrook/

You can find Stephen on:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/slightreliability.bsky.social
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/SlightReliability
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@the_kiwi_sre

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This week I'm joined by SRE leader Andrew Hatch from Cisco ThousandEyes to talk about a dirty word in the resilience community... root cause. In this excellent conversation we explore...

🌌 Is the root cause of every incident the big bang?
🦖 How the value of root cause degrades as complexity increases
🫣 That if the culture is not blameless, people will hide things
🌳 Alternative approaches to root cause analysis such as branching timelines
🙋 Getting someone without skin in the game to facilitate your blameless post-mortems

...and much more.

You can find Andrew on:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hatchman76/

Check out Andrew's SREcon21 talk 'Learning from Complex Systems' which covers many of the topics introduced in this episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pKGW61Ryvo

You can find Stephen on:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/slightreliability.bsky.social
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/SlightReliability
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@the_kiwi_sre

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This week I'm joined by David Dick from 2 Steps to (finally!) discuss synthetic monitoring. We cover...

🤖 What is synthetic monitoring?
🦾 What are the benefits and drawbacks to using it?
☢️ Non-web based synthetics (the tough stuff)
🍹 Combining RUM and synthetics
🫢 Does synthetics need an OTEL-like framework?

...and much more.

You can find David on:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-dick/

You can find more about 2 Steps at https://2steps.io/#

You can find Stephen on:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/slightreliability.bsky.social
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/SlightReliability
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slight_reliability/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@the_kiwi_sre